I'm working on it. The problem is making the sorcerer someone sympathetic, someone who's doing the wrong thing for all the right reasons. Otherwise the Dogs will find it easy to just turn up and shoot him, which would rather deflate the town.

I've been reading a lot of old Batman comics from the '90s lately. Those writers find the role of Commissioner Gordon (Captain Gordon in many tales that are set in the past) rather touchy. It's like they all woke up one day and realized that hey, we're not really doing a very good job depicting lawful legal authority as competent and heroic here, are we? Then they'll go into writing a lot of stories that problematize the fact that relying on Batman means that not only is Gordon a crybaby, but also incompetent for needing that sort of extralegal help to do his job.

This is counteracted in the comics by arguing that Gotham has special conditions that require special heroes. Some crimes are for the police to solve, some are for Batman alone. Then there are the revanchist stories where Gordon and his boys in blue conquer maniacs like the Joker while Batman is on a holiday. The villains usually can't believe that regular police can touch them, but they're wrong there, it seems.